Improving honeybee populations?

I came accross this article and still haven't been able to find the USDA survey release associated with it.

The number of honey-producing bee
colonies in the U.S. rose 7.4 percent last year
and honey production was up 20 percent,
the Department of Agriculture said.

About 2.684 million colonies were reported
by beekeepers with five or more hives in
2010, the USDA said Friday in a report.
Honey production rose to 65.5 pounds per
colony, up 12 percent from 2009, with
overall output at 176 million pounds. The
average price at the private and retail levels
was $1.603 a pound, an all-time high and up
8.8 percent from the previous record last
year, the USDA said.

If this is the full story this is very good news.  I would like to find the full survey to see if it mentions the size of colonies.  Beekeepers could be maintaining more hives that are smaller colonies by splitting colonies into two hives as population rises in the summer.  Also honey prices have dramatically increased in the last few years, so it is possible that more beekeepers are focusing more on honey production than just making their money on pollination.  Bee colonies were still being flown in from Australia last year for pollination, which tells me along with continued high pollination rates that farmers are still struggling to get bees for pollination.

Hopefully we are turning the corner or at least things are getting less worse.  But with many surveys like this the devil is in the details.  While colonies may be improving and honey production is ramping up, pollination could still be in peril.  I would like to get the full story.

Permaculture and Polyculture.

Paul gives a good run down on how interconnected plants can be in agriculture.  Also he shows the pitfalls of monoculture where only one type of crop is grown in an area.

Agriculture measured in barrels not bushels.

With the recent run up in oil it is particularly timely to look at the impact of higher oil prices on agriculture.  Long term our current structure of industrial large scale agriculture is not sustainable to keep prices low on commodity crops.  Since WWII production has been increasing per acre quite dramatically.  Pesticides, cheap synthetic fertilizers and a low cost transportation system boosted yields at the same time crop prices moderated even as populations globally soared. 

(ratio of corn out/energy in):

Ratio in 1945 = 3.5
Ratio in 1983 = 2.5

Between 1910 and 1983, corn yields in the US increased by 346% (on a per area basis), which the energy inputs increased by 810%, also on a per area basis!
That is, we are putting more and more fossil fuel energy into production for a given level of output! Viewed slightly differently, we're not getting as much more corn out as we are putting extra energy in; the efficiency ratio is worsening over time!

As you can see the large gains in agricultural yields has been on the back of an expanding oil supply and better technology.  While I am not in the camp that we are running out of oil, we are running out of "cheap" oil namely light sweet crude which is easier and cheaper to refine than heavier varieties.  Also many of the land based oil fields are maturing making oil more costly to extract in new areas such as off shore.

Wikipedia:

Switching to natural gas could help blunt the impact of an oil price spike.  New natural gas fields are being found and new technology has greatly increased recovery rates.  Natural gas is cleaner than oil but we are still looking at supply constraints to keep up with the current trajectory of food production needed for population growth.  Natural gas is used extensively in ammonia fertilizer production.Ammonia production depends on plentiful supplies of natural gas, a finite resource, to provide the hydrogen. Due to ammonia's critical role in intensive agriculture and other processes, sustainable production is desirable. This is possible by using renewable energy to generate hydrogen by electrolysis of water. This would be straightforward in a hydrogen economy by diverting some hydrogen production from fuel to feedstock use. For example, in 2002, Iceland produced 2,000 tons of hydrogen gas by electrolysis, using excess electricity production from its hydroelectric plants, primarily for the production of ammonia for fertilizer.^[3] The Vemork hydroelectric plant in Norway used its surplus electricity output to generate renewable ammonia from 1911 to 1971.^[4] In practice, natural gas will remain the major source of hydrogen for ammonia production as long as it is cheapest.

As you can see keeping ammonia inexpensive and plentiful will be difficult.  If we look to electrolysis for hydrogen production we need to produce more clean electricity.   Cost of new energy for electricity will become more expensive as fossil fuel prices continue to rise.  My feeling is that until alternative energy picks up the slack for higher oil prices, natural gas will step in as an acceptable alternative.  Increased natural gas demand will keep fertilizer prices  increasing. 

What are the alternatives.  Swing the pendulum back towards more small farms, less monoculture and more local production.  It may cost more to grow a tomato in the north than in Mexico but the increasing price of transportation will keep smaller local farms economically viable.  Much more study must be done to improve a poly-culture approach to agriculture.  What crops grow best together?  What can be used on the farm to provide its own fertilizer? 

I am very optimistic on agriculture and farming in the long term.  It will be a struggle to deal with higher fossil fuel cost but eventually we will be more sustainable and less dependent on fossil fuels.

More on building your own top bar hive

Here are several videos on building your own top bar hive.  Top bar hives help prevent mites that spread diseases.  Top bar hives are also an affordable alternative to buying a more widely used langsroth hive.  Here are some previous posts on top bar plans here and here.


How To Build A Kenya Top Bar Hive - Part 1 - Top Bars from DavesBees on Vimeo.


How To Build A KTBH - Part 2 - Follower Boards from DavesBees on Vimeo.


How To build A Kenya Top Bar Hive - Part 3 - Legs And Hive Ends from DavesBees on Vimeo.


How To Build A Kenya Top Bar Hive – Part 4 – Drill Legs And Attach Ends from DavesBees on Vimeo.


How To Build A Kenya Top Bar Hive - Part 5 - Finish Hive And Attach Legs from DavesBees on Vimeo.


How To Build A Kenya Top Bar Hive - Part 6 - The Lid from DavesBees on Vimeo.

More Top Bar Hive Plans

Here is another set of plans to build your own top bar hive. Top bar hives do a good job replicating a hive design closer to what is in nature like a hollow log. The advantage to the bees drawing out all of their own comb is that it helps prevent mites. Mites have a hard time climbing back on to the combs and bees with the much larger gap below than commercial hives. Mites carry viruses and disease that spreads through the hive. Minimize mites and you will have a healthier hive all around. You can see a previous post of plans here.

Visual Step-By-step Construction of a Kenyan Top Bar Hive

Commercial Pollination going forward.

The honeybee is not native to North America.  Europeans had been keeping bees for centuries before bringing them to the new world.  The first colonies of bees were brought over by the colonists for honey production and pollination.  Beekeeping became more important to agriculture to boost crop yields.  Farms initially had diversity in the crops that they produced.  Farmers were raising their own food and a surplus to sell at market.  Bees were kept at the farm and had a diversity of flowers and blossoms to forage. 

As agriculture became more specialized and more reliant on economies of scale to production costs low, bees were moved around the country to pollinate one crop after another as they bloomed.  This is done on a large scale with bees only having one type of blossom to forage for weeks at a time.  Until the last hundred years bees were never used like this, transported on semi-trucks to one field or orchard after another.  It boosts crop yields but bees never evolved to be dependent upon a monoculture, they aren't designed for the industrial agricultural paradigm. 

We shouldn't be surprised of the large bee losses lately inclusively known as CCD or colony collapse disorder.   Beekeepers that don't follow the blooming of crops around the country aren't having the same problems.  Comparatively the losses of small natural and organic beekeepers are minimal.    As an analogy imagine that you are a traveling salesman going to a new city each month but the catch is that you can only eat one type of food breakfast, lunch and dinner.  Bacon one month, pepperoni pizza the next, plain rice the next and dry salads the next.  After a season like this you would probably be malnourished, even though if you mixed it all you would be fine.  Same things with the bees monoculture and traveling are making their immune systems diminished and more susceptible to disease.

Honeybees have done well for centuries on farms with diversity and farms set within a natural environment of diversity.  As honey bees and some native pollinators like bats and wild bees continue to die off, industrial agriculture will have to change or be forced to change.  Crop yields will continue to suffer until a more integrated approach is made towards pollinators.

Some alternatives are:

Set aside an easement on a farm for native and commercial pollinators to forage.  This allows more diversity in pollinators for better pollination.  Some pollinators do better in cool or wet weather than honeybees allow even better crop yield.  More forage for bees will allow pollinators to be kept in the same area year round.

Vary the crops being grown, much like crop rotation diversity of crops will cut down on one single pest that thrives in an environment of their favorite plant to vex.  Bees can fly up to 3 miles to forage so large farms can grow several tracts of crops giving some diversity to pollinators.

Research.  More research needs to be done in finding better farming techniques that look at farming as a series of systems that all work together to be more self-sufficient.  Growing crops to help fertilize others, growing crops to help pollinate others and growing crops to help conserve water in the field. 
The problem with this type of research can be summed up in one phrase "follow the money".  There will never be the economic incentive to do in-depth research into dynamic farming as producing the next block buster billion dollar GMO crop or pesticide.  The financial incentive is just not their in research and more and more funding at the university level is coming from the big chemical and modified crop companies.  Companies help fund research that they can use while other funding gets cut due to budget constraints. 

Eventually a few enterprising individuals will show success and profit with a fully integrated permaculture method of farming.  This will be about the same time oil becomes so expensive that conventional agriculture will be looking to alternatives to petroleum based fertilizers and long distances transport.

Controlling Pests with Bugscaping and Healthy plants.

Natural Pest Control in the Organic Garden

Honey bee collateral damage from Clothianidin "poncho" acceptable to EPA

A few months ago a memo leaked from the EPA (not a Wikileak counter to some claims) exposes clothianidin as toxic to honey bees.  Clothianidin produced by Bayer crop sciences as "poncho" is in the  nicotine family of pesticides.   Poncho has been banned in several European countries so far, Germany, France, Italy and Slovenia.  It is used on corn, canola, beets, wheat, sunflowers  and Soy. 

Neonicotinoid family pesticides work by being taken up into the plant and making it poisonous to 'pests" and other insects that happen to be there.  Poncho has been found in the pollen and nectar of plants.

From the label recomendations :

This compound is toxic to birds and mammals. Treated clothianidin seeds exposed on soilsurface may be hazardous to birds and mammals. Cover or collect clothianidin seeds spilledduring loading. This compound is toxic to honey bees.  The persistence of residues and potential residual toxicityof Clothianidin in nectar and pollen suggests the possibility of chronic toxic risk to honey beelarvae and the eventual instability of the hive

And from a PhD entomologist

According to James Frazier, PhD., professor of entomology at Penn State’s College of Agricultural Sciences, "Among the neonicotinoids, clothianidin is among those most toxic for honey bees; and this combined with its systemic movement in plants has produced a troubling mix of scientific results pointing to its potential risk for honey bees through current agricultural practices. Our own research indicates that systemic pesticides occur in pollen and nectar in much greater quantities than has been previously thought, and that interactions among pesticides occurs often and should be of wide concern." Dr. Frazier said that the most prudent course of action would be to take the pesticide off the market while the flawed study is being redone.

The EPA knows all the evidence and the toxicity but it still stays on the market.  One has to wonder who is the EPA working for.  No wonder bees are showing much higher losses in big agricultural areas.   Eventually the fall of bee populations will catch up to the point that farmers won't worry so much about increasing yield with chemical pesticides if they don't have pollinators for their crops.


The full EPA memo is here.

Green Cities: time to walk the talk.

Being that I live near a city that is very concerned about its carbon footprint, (so much so streets get shut down to cars and beach bonfires are banned) I am rather surprised how little is done on their own part to improve the environment.  There are literally square miles of parks, parking strips and medians that lie fallow or are planted with ornamental plants.  My hat is off to the many hundreds of intrepid gardeners that convert parking strips and roundabouts for gardens and plant diversity. 

If cities really wanted to make changes to become greener, the low hanging fruit that doesn't impose laws on what people can or can't do is to utilize city land for plant diversity, carbon sequestration and food production. 

The average American meal travels over 1500 miles to reach their plate.  The transportation costs are offset by doing agriculture on such a large scale it produces food cheaply.........as long as oil and natural gas prices stay low.  What happens at $150 a barrel oil?  Food becomes more expensive as it costs more to fertilize and transport. 

I understand it is not feasible for a city to produce all of its own food but, what is the logic behind planting municipal land with ornamental and typically with little diversity.  Just phasing in some hardy fruit and nut trees and shrubs would provide some food for those who want it at no extra cost to taxpayers.  There is also more of a sense of ownership for people.  If you have a fruit tree in front of your house that you eat from you will be more likely to look after it than a tree that you don't get anything from. 

This could work to augment efforts to help the homeless the hungry and city supported food banks.  Schools could put in a few trees to show that food doesn't come from a store but a farm or garden.  Eating publicly grown produce is not for everyone of course but just that it is there millions of calories will get eaten by somebody and that is one less trip food has to make.

Many cities are already doing this, there has been a groundswell of interest in urban gardening, pea patches and converting your front yard into a food source.  The emphasis now should be to stay on city governments to make sure they are good stewards of the earth and our tax dollars at the same time. 

Gardening in small spaces with high yield. Intensive gardens not intensive labor

Intensive gardening has been around for centuries. Maximizing your food production has always been a goal of farmers and home gardeners. Taking a holistic approach to your planting can give better yield and lower labor. Let the plants do the work for you when possible.

1 Plant to build the soil. Plant non-edible plants that build the soil in the off season to till in in the spring time to build the soil. Or you can intersperse nitrogen fixing flowers in your garden for added color. Most importantly you are building the soil and stealing space from the weeds.

2 Plant to minimize watering. Know your plants. Some plants that like partial shade will do well under your tomato trellis. This will both shade the soil which keeps down the evaporation, and this will compete with weeds. Plant vegetables with deep taproots like carrots to help pull up the moisture from deep and use shallow rooted crop for shade.

3 Plant to maximize pollination. Flowers and vegetables can be added to the garden to attract pollinators and your other plants will get the benefit. You can find some garden vegetables to plant for pollinators here and flowers to plant here

4 Plant to prevent pest and disease. There are many companion plants out there that help prevent pests. Garlic for example helps repel slugs and aphids. So instead of planting a nice row of garlic, plant throughout the garden as long as the other plants get along with garlic.

5 Plant to maximize calories. If you are growing a garden to feed yourself and reduce your grocery bill, look to calorie rich produce like potatoes, sweet potatoes and leeks.

There are so many combinations of plants, coming up with what works in your garden and climate can be a daunting task. You can find a good basic list of companion plants here on wikipedia.


Intensive gardening nirvana is when you design a garden that requires minimal work, the plants help water themselves, fertilize themselves, pollinate and prevent pests in the garden.